Rigorous efforts are underway in recent years for development of light and compact electronic devices. Such electronic devices require liquid crystal display devices of low power consumption. For reduced power consumption of liquid crystal display devices, intermission driving is proposed as a promising technique. A liquid crystal display device which performs intermission driving alternately repeats a drive period for scanning lines and writing data voltage thereby refreshing an image, and an intermission period for bringing all the scanning lines into a de-selected state thereby stopping the writing of data voltage. In the intermission period, a voltage applied to a liquid crystal layer in each pixel formation portion during an immediately preceding drive period (hereinafter called “liquid crystal application voltage”) is maintained, so the displayed image is maintained. Hence, during the intermission period, operation of a gate driver and/or of a source driver can be stopped and therefore it is possible to reduce power consumption. Patent Literature 1, for example, discloses a liquid crystal display device which performs such an intermission driving as described above.
The liquid crystal display device uses a liquid crystal panel, which is composed of two electrode panels sandwiching a liquid crystal layer in between. As a voltage is applied to the liquid crystal layer, liquid crystal molecules in the liquid crystal layer change their alignment direction (orientation of the long axis) due to dielectric constant anisotropy of the liquid crystal. As the liquid crystal molecules change their alignment direction, light which passes through the liquid crystal layer is polarized in a different direction. It is possible, using this principle, to control the amount of light which passes through the liquid crystal layer by controlling the voltage applied to the liquid crystal layer. Therefore it is possible to control brightness of each pixel formation portion to a desired gradation level, and thereby display an image in the liquid crystal panel. The liquid crystal layer is sandwiched by two electrodes, one of which is a pixel electrode which is supplied with the data voltage via a thin film transistor (TFT) while the other of the electrodes sandwiching the liquid crystal layer is a common electrode, which is supplied with a common voltage that is common to all of the pixel formation portions. The common voltage is a voltage which is used as a baseline for the liquid crystal application voltage in the liquid crystal display device.